Weekly links for June 10

Why you shouldn’t use a toss for overtime (in American football).

Who Is the Best Player Ever? A Complex Network Analysis of the History of Professional Tennis

Data scientists working for good causes.

Bike sharing and quadratic vote buying.

Ten controversial math problems from Business Insider. (Not really, but it’s some old chestnuts.)

Julie Rehmeyer for Science News on how category theory is good for something; David Spivak has a book-length set of notes category theory for scientists.

Johnny Carson botches the birthday problem. (via Steve Strogatz.)

Quantifying movie magic with Google search.

How likely is the NSA PRISM program to catch a terrorist.

Joseph Blitzstein has a short talk on the soul of statistics (spoiler: it’s conditioning.) (15 minutes on YouTube.) Relatedly at You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney wrote an essay on survivorship bias.

How many friends of friends do you have on facebook?